Post-Apocalyptic Plots
January 18th, 2011
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another Grave Plots, where we bring you new and exciting adventure ideas each and every week. This week, as you all know, is Sci-fi Week, and so I’ve got a few nifty ideas for you to try out for your next foray into science fiction. For those of you who aren’t currently running a science fiction game, don’t fret - the themes in science fiction resonate perfectly well in other forms of storytelling: just change all instances of “spaceship” to just plain old “ship,” and all instances of “alien” to “orc,” and you should still do fine. With that being said, let’s get started.
The first thing one needs to consider when talking about sci-fi adventures is: what kind of sci-fi are we talking about? It should come as no surprise that there are many distinct subgenres of sci-fi, each with their own distinct style. For this article I will be examining one of the most popular subgenres in science fiction, specifically post-apocalyptic sci-fi. The second thing one needs to decide before running a sci-fi adventure is where your game lands on the hard-soft scale, with hard games putting more of an emphasis on the plausibility of fantastic scientific elements and has a stronger basis in existing science, whereas soft sci-fi utilizes the genre style to explore social issues and human nature; most sci-fi stories fall somewhere in the middle. How much to focus on the hard science is largely up to you and your group. It’s important to find a balance that is appealing to everyone involved, so it might be a good idea to find out where your players stands on the hard-soft scale before getting started. Once you’ve decided on those things, then all that’s left is to decide on the details of the setting you’re using and go about your business, planning adventures and the like. With that in mind, let’s have a look at some potential plots.
Post-apocalyptic
Post-apocalyptic sci-fi settings, as the name might imply, take place after some kind of cataclysmic event that destroyed civilization. A post-apocalyptic story could take place in an environment either directly after the disaster or hundreds of years afterward – the only important feature is that the cataclysmic event still holds significant influence over the game. Many post-apocalyptic stories focus on the struggles of societies reforming after the fall, now faced with new challenges such as extreme pollution, mutants, deadly technological remnants and the like. Other stories focus on the social issues of the previous age, and use the situation to create a world without the decadence and corruption of the past.
Before you start your post-apocalyptic adventure there are a few big decisions one needs to make; first, it is very important to decide how your world was destroyed, both because it is likely to be a centrally important event in the lives of every character in your game (or the mythologies of those characters, if the event was long ago), and because it will come in handy when planning world building and adventure planning. Some sample explanations include plague, nuclear war, asteroid strike, alien invasion, or even a magic spell.
Now that you have that piece of information, it is important to look at what survived the cataclysm. This will help to populate your world and could color the whole tone of your game; for example, if a plague wiped out large portions of humanity then perhaps most of their technology is still intact, whereas if a giant meteor struck the world and destroyed everything not kept safe in an underground super-bunker, the surface might contain nothing but an irradiated wasteland inhabited by angry ghosts and super-durable killer robots. The most important thing this will tell you is how many people made it through: perhaps a whole nation, perhaps a scattered dozen, perhaps only the PCs. Deciding how many people made it through the cataclysm will effectively decide the number of persons with which the PCs can have social interaction.
Next it comes time to figure out how the PCs (or their ancestors if the cataclysm was a long time ago) made it through the catastrophic events that destroyed their world. This will help you and your players get a better feel for their immediate history, perhaps provide a unifying element for an adventuring party, and could even provide some interesting plot hooks.
Here’s a sample plot to get you going:
A terrible plague, engineered by a self-aware AI with a god complex, has been unleashed on humanity. This plague was created to destroy the intellect of mankind, leaving them creatures of pure animalistic instinct, perfect for the AI’s molding. When the government learned of the AI’s plan and shut it down, hoping to prevent it from enacting its scheme little did they know they were already too late: without the AI’s guiding influence, humanity was doomed to quickly become mindless, mutated, killing machines. Without humanity’s careful maintenance, the power systems of the world failed, and the great technologies of mankind became inoperable and, for all intents and purposes, shut down. The PCs had been placed in cryostasis containment just prior to the fall by research scientists who believed that a unique chromosome in their DNA holds the key to curing the plague. However, as the cryogenic containment unit lost power, it spuang open, and the PCs find themselves in a new and unfamiliar world. With their unusual DNA the PCs are safe from the plague, but still face numerous dangers out in the world. T hey have joined together in order to increase their odds of survival.
In this new world the PCs must compete with super strong savage mutants for even the most basic of necessities, and without easy access to renewable food sources they may be faced with considering morally questionable options, such as cannibalism and filth consumption. Apart from food, the PCs will likely need to seek out shelter within the abandoned non-functional super-cities of the future, which entails its own risks: mutants, old security systems still active after all this time, and even more mundane dangers like building rot, and deadly mold. If the PCs are to survive they will either need to find a way out of the cities and try to live off of the land, now inhabited by the descendants of experiments in genetic engineering who roam the wilds, or find a way to restore power to a city and make use of the comforts found therein. Finally, if the PCs are looking for a long-term solution to their problem they will need to find other groups of naturally plague-immune citizens and band together in pursuit of future civilization.
Unknown to the PCs, they have already attracted the attention of one such plague immune citizen, the insane doctor Merin, who believes that the PCs’ blood is required to reverse the mutation process. Doctor Merin quickly becomes obsessed with capturing the PCs in order to perform his crazed experiments, and if they want to have any chance of restoring civilization, or even surviving to see another day, they will have to overcome the insane Doctor.
Ok, well that’s it for this week’s Grave Plots. I will see you all next week; until then, I would like to wish you all the best in your gaming endeavors.